Security

Jeanson Ancheta, 20, installed pop-up adware on the commandeered computers and rented his "botnet" -- or network of computers compromised by Trojan horses that allow remote control of the infected machine -- to other hackers for profit, prosecutors say. Ancheta is charged with 17 federal counts incl...

A fruitless prosecution against a teenager in English court highlights the inadequacy of that nation's cyberlaws to cope with denial of service attacks. The youth was accused of sending 5 million e-mails to a former employer, thereby shutting down the company's servers. The case did not fail because...

Government -- and industry -- executives are moving forward with plans to increase the use of authentication technologies, and prevent fraud online. The Direct Marketing Association, based in Chicago, two weeks ago issued a set of rules for its members, and the federal government, a few days earlier...

The standards for setting charges -- and later sentences -- for hackers differs dramatically on a state by state basis. But one thing is increasingly clear -- authorities are stepping up action against hackers of mobile phones, PDAs and conventional computer systems. New developments in mobile phone...

Federal authorities have broken up a massive piracy ring that they say was capable of producing millions of counterfeit music and software CDs. Three California men face a range of charges after being indicted by a federal grand jury in San Francisco on counterfeiting charges. The charges resulted f...

Symantec has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire an agent-less IT security compliance software company in a US$209 million all-cash transaction. Symantec said the acquisition of BindView Development Corporation would allow it to offer customers an end-to-end solution for p...

Saying a consumer that is aware of online threats is essential to a strong U.S. economy, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched its most ambitious effort yet to educate Americans on the dangers lurking on the Web. The FTC joined today with cybersecurity experts in government and the private...

The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are investigating allegations of fraud by small charities -- or organizations posing as such charities -- that arose in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Online bill payment service PayPal, stepping up its security in response to the concerns over onli...

Today's virus outbreaks are not as loud as the Code Red attacks of a couple years ago, but beneath the quieter computing landscape is a perilous push to turn the growing amount of personal computers and personal information into profit through cybercrime, the latest Threat Report from security firm ...

Phishing scams seeking to steal donations earmarked for Hurricane Katrina victims may have started a week ago, but security experts said to expect a spike in this fraudulent activity in the weeks to come. Scam artists often prey upon the sympathy for tragedy victims by sending out millions of spam m...

For the last year or so, online financial institutions and their IT consultants -- as well as consumer interest groups -- have focused on fixing security, adding authentication and encryption and other technologies to forestall scammers. But the phishing plague continues. Now, experts tell The E-Com...

Controversial plans in the U.S. and the UK to institute national identification cards as a way of curtailing identity theft will likely only lead to different versions of the same crimes, according to a researcher. The UK researcher also says that consumers will consider national ID cards to offer s...

As heart-wrenching images of devastation and despair from New Orleans and others parts of the Gulf Coast of the U.S. continue to rivet Americans from coast to coast, computer security experts are warning that scammers have already devised elaborate phishing attacks and other online scams meant to ta...

For many of us, the significance of the spam problem does not become a concern until it results in blocking of legitimate e-mails. Then the global -- and national -- problem of spam can instantly become an individual problem. The 2004 National Technology Readiness Survey estimated that spam costs th...

With more than 40 million recently compromised credit cards available to fraudsters, merchants are faced with the challenge of preventing the use of these cards on their Web sites. What once was considered a rather insignificant cost of doing business online, has become a highly organized and profit...